Peter Thiel

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Bio

Peter Thiel has had one of the most extraordinary, and boundary-defying, careers in the brief history of Silicon Valley. After co-founding PayPal with Elon Musk, among others, Thiel became the first outside investor in Facebook. That same year he also invested $30 million of his own money into Palantir, the big-data start-up analysis company that has been valued at $20 billion. On the side, he helps run a venture-capital fund and hedge fund.

Perhaps Thiel’s most surprising move came in the spring of 2016, when he became a delegate for presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. While it might have seemed unlikely that a Silicon Valley acolyte would endorse, and support, the famously anti-immigration candidate who wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, Thiel is a libertarian who has long broken from the Valley’s mainstream politics. He supported Mitt Romney in 2012 and Ron Paul in 2008. He also gave $2 million to Carly Fiorina’s super-PAC before she dropped out of the race. In mid-May, Thiel drew more headlines by confirming what many had suspected: he’d been secretly funding wrestler Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker, to the tune of about $10 million, according to The New York Times. Still smarting from an almost decade-old Gawker post about him and others about his friends, Thiel told the Times, “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence. [It’s] one of my greatest philanthropic things that I’ve done. I think of it in those terms.”